"Sexual mutilation and the moral order"
Write the first paragraph of your article here. Section heading SEXUAL MUTILATION AND THE MORAL ORDER, (problematics and basic concepts of the struggle against sexual mutilation) “It is not worth while saying “This postulate: parents, learning, power, That children resemble us, And that cunning dictatorship That they endure the same scars Which removes them from their initial beauty...” And that they're born with violence. It really suits us to say that, “When you were a child, remember those marks, It helps us to educate them They already told you that enjoyment was hell.” In our image, in our image. ” Morice Bénin Section heading Who and why? (The agent of sexual mutilation: the moral order –Initiation is submission.) “This commandment has not been prescribed to correct a physical deficiency but a moral one.” Maimonides, XIIth century The Jewish philosopher Maimonides ascribed circumcision to a moral order. We stand against this often religious but falsely moral order that tries to dominate the child as the adult, through setting up a terrorist corporal punishment, which can only be lived as parental betrayal, into family, in the name of the "black pedagogy": "Hush, it’s for your own sake!" Thanks to their natural weakness, girls are the most often spared. Boys endure the barbarous torture of a traumatizing beginning of realization of threat of castration. Under the guise of religion, cultural identity, folklore or passage into adulthood, these rites foremost aim at an alleged guarantee of moral and physical purity. But, in 2010, the first in history, the Royal Dutch medical association took an adamant stand against non-therapeutic circumcision that, without necessity and at the price of sometimes serious complications, violates the right of the child to physical integrity, dignity and autonomy. Relatively minor, these crimes against humanity (minors) are not punishable inasmuch as, resting upon antique customs, they are devoid of intention of harming. But that is on the condition that they will be stopped as soon as their damaging effects will have become notorious. These atrocious tortures are accompanied by verbal repression that, for the sake of a puritan conception of purity, forbids so-called infantile and before wedding sexuality, operating a mental mutilation, sole present in the rest of humanity. This sexual in the general meaning mutilation similarly subjects the individual to hypocritical puritanism. May be less irreversible, mutilation of the minds through speech, Paulinian, Christian and Western, is as fearsome as physical excision. It has the same aim of rendering the individual compliant through traumatizing them by putting into unconscious terror. Under threat of exclusion of the family, a stupid decree makes autosexuality the original sin. It is fierce and dangerous because it is a both parental and societal lie, difficult to eradicate from minds. The damage provoked by mental repression is as incalculable as that of physical repression. The discoveries of psychoanalysis (on the one hand, infantile sexuality and the unconscious, on the other hand, the emphasis upon infantile trauma put forth by Freud and Alice Miller) stand against this abuse. Violence in education, rather than tender care, has catastrophic results: breeding violence, addiction, depression, neurosis, psychosis and perversion. Transcultural studies of American anthropology (cf. James Prescott – violence.de) have, with absolute statistical correlation, extended the observations of psychoanalysts to entire populations. They report that pain is inhibited by pleasure, and reciprocally, and that violence stems from lack of tenderness in infancy and of the prohibition of premarital sexuality. What? (sexual mutilation: the height of repression of infantile sexuality) "At night, before going to bed, they all had to m.......te, in order to know well what they were going to loose, their wizougoré (manja dialect),…" Gérard Zwang (preface of The drama of excision by Dore-Miloch L.) "Do not throw your seed amongst thorn-bushes. Manage to circumcise yourselves..." (Jeremiah, 4: 3-4) Freud rose against this universal taboo and made himself the spokesman of the very lightly said infantile sexuality, including natural exhibitionism and voyeurism. By discovering its existence (manusexuality and auto-fellatio) right up inside the womb, prenatal ultrasonography today brings him strong backing, since the innocence of the foetus is obvious. However, it is still repressed in one way or another. Indeed, imagine a being that has freely practised autosexuality in its mother’s womb. You are this being. Now imagine that once out of this Eden, while quietly being bathed, you are suddenly glowered at and harshly told: "Why is it so? You touched it?" as if it had previously been forbidden. Isn't affirming as known and normal the existence of a never uttered ban the summit of repression? To crown it all, insidiously, hypocritically, everybody around you not only condemns nudity but also disparages your act of self love by referring to it through reproachful terms. The root (manus stupratio) of the most common one denotes disturbance – like in per-turbation – and turpitude. "Autosexuality" must replace the execrable term invented by religious, made guilty and allegedly chaste bachelors but very often revealing themselves paedophile. Without acknowledging that autosexuality is not debauchery, fighting sexual violence and crime is illusory. Minors emotionally perceive repression of infantile sexuality as a death threat through loss of love, and thus forsaking. Outlawing pleasure, that threat can only oppose the resolution of the Oedipus complex: adherence to law. So is it likely to block children or adolescents in their growth. Perversions, notably paedophilia, the twin sister of homophilia, and rape, are the direct consequence – aggravated by the sexual fuss of the media – of the hypocritical public reprobation of what everybody practises in private. Only seducers, rapists, paedophiles and homophiles "m.......te", in their victims, granting them the same contempt they endured in their own autosexuality of childhood. They will no longer need that when autosexuality will be accepted. Hurting human dignity in a way typical of the moral order: a violation of intimacy, sexual mutilation is a height of that repression. Denuding someone and mutilating him or her is a revolting humiliation. How? (a definition) The preservation of the clitoris and the foreskin is founded on six facts that illustrate their essential-to-life character. First fact: minors. Sexual mutilation the most often aims at minors. However, Western feminists, who have been at the vanguard of the struggle, speak of feminine mutilation alone. Monopolizing the fight, they make it a contest between both sex adults, blame men for being the instigators of merely executing women, and accuse the non sexist of "amalgamating" excision and circumcision. But one may not amalgamate violence against adults and violence against minors. The war of the sexes is a war of "adults ignoring the child within themselves" (Maud Mannoni), and that of generations is war on children (in order to avoid all resistance, excision is now practised at birth). Following Mrs Albagly (Director of the DDASS of the Rhône - 02.26.07 FSM colloquium in Lyon), we affirm that "The right to the respect of the physical integrity of all children is not negotiable." One must not speak of masculine or feminine sexual mutilation but of sexual mutilation quite simply. Second fact: sexual. The specific organs for autosexuality are not genital organs but purely sexual organs. The clitoris, notably, is the sole organ of creation intended for mere pleasure, without any other function. Excision lessens, suppresses or turns pleasure into pain but does not impede reproduction. With man, the loss is limited to preputial pleasure, but the destruction of clitoral pleasure often entails that of vaginal pleasure; two thirds of the excised are frigid. Third fact: physical mutilation. For eighty per cent of the population of the planet who enjoy these organs, the particular, incidentally extreme pleasure they provide is indisputable for both sexes. Recent anatomical discoveries bring scientific founding to this empirical affirmation. John Taylor’s one, in 1996, concerns the part of exquisite erogenous mechanism of the tip of the preputial lip (the dear to the Scots pleated ring). It ends the tale according to which the sheath protecting the erogeneity of the glans, man's mini-vagina in autosexuality, would not be an organ. Not having been awarded the Nobel prize it deserves, it remains ignored though it has been experimentally confirmed by Sorrells’s sensitivity enquiry. At last, the third sexual function of the foreskin – that of a gliding cushion reducing friction in coitus – has also been highlighted. It explains why the African women whose partners are sexually mutilated are more hit by AIDS. Several enquiries have shown that the circumcision status does not influence transmission of STDs, but for AIDS in the medium term. But elementary ethics and deontology forbid mutilation for prophylactic motive, and all the more children mutilation. No one has the right to practise circumcision of child or adult without serious medical motive. Fourth fact: the psychic trauma. Highlighted by Freud, traumas bearing on infantile sexuality provoke the formation of the unconscious and are a deep cause of mental disease. Assaulting the image of the body, the castration of the organs for autosexuality has strong emotional repercussions and creates a grave trauma, the most often unconscious. Autosexuality, the very first, most natural, innocent and harmless sexuality is heavily made guilty. Indeed, sexual mutilation threatens boys of total castration. However, and even in non circumcising cultures, girls, as well as boys, unconsciously suffer from the threat associated with circumcision. Indeed, if the sheath of the glans is destroyed with boys, what then may happen to an as small and pure enjoyment organ as the clitoris, without protective function? But it is enough with a symbolic or oral threat; so, in Indonesia, it occurs that the mere passing along of a knife over the body of the child is substituted for excision. Fifth fact: the so-called symbolical taking of possession of the individual by the group and the laying down of the law of the strongest through terrorist violence. The human sacrifice of a part of the body implements a powerful psychological mechanism of enslavement of the person. Indeed, for the unconscious, as for the fetishist, infantile or primitive soul, the part is equivalent to the whole (cf. the abuses of Voodoo that, after the prohibition of sexual mutilation by the enslavers, "possesses" its victims by cutting off a lock of hair, till forcing them to prostitution). This abuse of power finds pretexts in illusory adult learning and inacceptable possessiveness: "I know, therefore I have the right to determine what will be done to your body." Sixth fact: discrimination and segregation. Performed in order to warrant an alleged moral superiority, sexual mutilation isolates the ethnic group through artificial racism, and sometimes in the aim of favouring endogamy. It is also a means of enslavement through exclusion of opponents. Possessory marking, sexual mutilation is a barbarian technique of banning infantile sexuality aiming at providing a perverse sway of the group over the still minor individual in order to force them to work, reproduction and war. It humiliates through condemning personal pleasure by the castration of its specific organs, make autosexuality painful for women and severely impoverish it for men. The atrocious pain and terror of the operation, and the permanent reminder of the related threat of castration, exclusion and death deeply traumatize, the most often unconsciously. So, it is one of the most odious techniques of enslaving and exploiting the individual. A last, if sexual mutilation pretends socializing through warranting moral value, the illusory superiority that destroys human identity in its most intimate part discriminates and segregates foreigners and opponents. The great function of sexual mutilation is to give the right to wedding through certifying a passage to adulthood accomplished within submission to the established order. It is a false certificate. At the contrary, one may fear that numerous maimed ones practically do not reach maturity, characterized by deep acknowledgment of the difference of sexes and of the desire of the other sex, an acquisition that alone enables peoples' access to genuine democracy. This is why we rise against sexist designations that set up one gender against the other instead of gathering them in the defence of toddlers. Irreversible, sexual mutilation harms children, adolescents, temporarily separate, divorced or with different sexual need couples, bachelors and widowers, that is the major part of the population. As long as the sexist speech ignoring child’s sexuality will prevail, it will be impossible to eradicate it. The consequences: exclusion, segregation, discrimination, racism and violence "An uncircumcised is not a man." (African saying) 1) The exclusion of opponents The African saying implies the casting out of the group of opponents of sexual mutilation, considered as debauched and coward; exclusion from the community is the systematic sanction of the absence of mutilation. This punishment well reveals the deep characters of the practice: an elitist seclusion and exclusion, a feeling of superiority that enables the sexually handicapped to fight depression, and, foremost, a barrier to marrying outside the group, great concern of the racists, and at last an obstacle to the burial of intacts in community cemeteries, or even in national ground (Saudi Arabia), but for posthumous circumcision (Jews)! 2) The assault on the human species and the discrimination of other ethnic groups ::: "But a private person may not perform such an ablation, even with the patient's consent; it would be committing an injustice to society, to which man belongs with all his limbs." Saint Thomas Aquinas But physical marking also attacks the human species. Founding a collective identity upon an assault against that of the species is not only degrading in itself, it is also discriminatory since it leads to illusorily believe oneself superior: virtue, spirituality, purity, chastity, fidelity, and boast about it. No people may carve out for themselves a purely formal identity upon the body of their children without offending the rest of humanity. For an alleged superiority through artificial differentiation is of racist type. It is even power two racism: some neo-Gobineau enacted by Mengele. Sexual mutilation is not racist properly speaking but it looks for making "supermen". Therefore, it is artificial racism, more racist than racism. Since it is committed without intention of harming, the only means of criminalizing it is exposing its will of discrimination and segregation under threat of exclusion of opponents. Such motivation is contrary to the tenth principle of the International declaration of the rights of the child of the United-Nations: "The child shall be protected from practices that… may foster racial, religious or any other form of discrimination..." An identity founded upon a mutilation is a false identity, an identity of collective alienation through auto-exclusion. Allegedly bringing a moral, physical (hygiene) and even sexual superiority, sexual mutilation, sectarian, separates the group from humanity. Antisexual, antidemocratic and culturalo-racist, it discriminates neighbouring groups and the individuals of the group itself who refuse it. Now, exclusion calls for hatred. Spinoza and Freud exposed circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples whom they scare. An extremely serious collective pathology (transgenerational and collective syndrome of Munchausen by proxy), sexual mutilation generates particularly high violence. Out of the twelve genocides of modern times, eleven, of which six as actors, implied sexually mutilated on one side or the other and three on both sides. But for one civil war (Sri Lanka), all wars between 1996 and 2002 involved at least one circumcising country and they were more than three times more numerous in circumcising countries. The death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they are the only ones to practise excision. In Norway, two per cent of circumcised commit sixty per cent of the rapes. Sexual mutilation separates the child from the mother at an age when this is the last thing to do; the result is catastrophic. It is the breeding ground of sexism, paranoia, fanaticism and group or state terrorism. More fascist than fascism, sexual mutilation is unbearable by fascists. This is not a reason for democrats to tolerate it. Taking for alibi the festivities of folklore, these ordeals are imposed by military and religious elites with adolescent behaviour. So, it has a sexist character. It does not welcome the child into a society regulated by the difference of sexes and ages. It socializes or affiliates through the inadmissible trauma of a barbarous and military initiation that incites to scorning and enlists into warlike gangs. So, it is encouraged by tyrannical regimes which use it as an initiation to violence and a sign of rallying. The community sign is always a call for nationalism, a sign of war, of possession of the individual and exclusion of the others. Scarf, veil, burka, tattoos, forced obesity, stretched oral or vulvar labia, scarifications, knocked off teeth, bound-feet, cut off clitorises and foreskins, the death penalty, to arms et cetera..., the escalation of the very ethnic techniques of manipulation of the minds through masking and marking the bodies – a great instrument of the war of generations and sexes – channels human needs at the service of the interests of the ruling classes. Conclusion If the fight against circumcision is victorious in the United States, that against deadly excision (5 to 15% immediate deaths) progresses only in dribs and drabs and, in a scandalous paradox, its medicalization south of the Mediterranean is followed by its restoration north of it. This because one attacks symptoms without getting to the root of the issue: guilt of autosexuality and making it guilty. Consequently, circumcision is not attacked in the same time, which would bring real efficiency to the fight. The recommendation of "abstinence" in the prevention of AIDS proves that autosexuality is considered as an infantile or debauched behaviour, to such a point that in certain societies, everything happens as if, facing the absence of biological sign of passage to adult age, the destruction of the specific organs for autosexuality had to be set up as a testimony of it. These societies seem ignoring that the human being is only an aging child and that those unable to regress cannot progress either. Sexual mutilation strikes the fundamental rights of 830 millions persons. Attacking excision only is neglecting 85% of the victims. Sexual mutilation has nothing to do with culture, tradition or religion; it is mere criminal collective madness in search for alibis. It is the tool of a particularly redoubtable tyranny. Founded upon a perversion of ethics distorted into moralizing morality, creating neurosis inside the people in order to give a social basis to that of the rulers, it pretends to give lessons to the people for the sake of those who exploit them. The abolition of this crime against humanity is a stage in the fight against the repression of sexuality and for the right of the human person to the free access to their own body and the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity, dignity and autonomy. The right to the body must become article 1st of the Universal declaration of human rights: "Indivisible and sacred, the right to the body, in its three dimensions of integrity, dignity and autonomy, is the very first human right." Sigismond (Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux) – oldsigismund@hotmail.com Independent psychoanalysis researcher, a former pupil of the Psychoanalysis department of Paris VIII university, author of “Sexual mutilation, the victims' point of view”, for free at http://intactwiki.org or http://circabolition.multiply.com This text was the subject of a lecture given 4.09.2008 in the University of Keele (UK), at the 10th international symposium of NOCIRC, organized with NORM-UK and the School of law of the university. GENOCIDE, WAR, THE DEATH PENALTY, RAPE, EXCISION, AND CIRCUMCISION I - Countries practising circumcision in a majority THE DEATH WARS TORTURE EXCISION PENALTY 1996-2002 (Frequency) (in principle) (in %) AFGHANISTAN X X X ALBANIA X ALGERIA X X X ANGOLA X X X AZERBAIJAN X BAHRAIN X BANGLADESH X X BENIN X 13 BISSAU GUINEA X 50 BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA X X BRUNEI X X BURKINA FASO X X 77 CAMEROON X 1,4 CENTRAL AFRICAN REP. X X X 43 CHAD X X X 45 COMOROS X DEM. REP. OF CONGO (ZAIRE) X X X 5 DJIBOUTI 98 EGYPT X X X 96 EQUATORIAL GUINEA X X ERITREA X X 89 ETHIOPIA X X X 80 FIJI X X GABON X GAMBIA X 80 GHANA X 30 GUINEA X X X 96 GUINEA-BISSAU X 50 INDONESIA X 90 IRAN X X X IRAQ X X X X ISRAEL X X X IVORY COAST X X 45 JORDAN X X X KAZAKHSTAN X X KENYA X X 32 KIRGHIZSTAN X KUWAIT X X X LEBANON X X X LESOTHO X X X LIBERIA X X X 58 LIBYA X X MADAGASCAR X MALAYSIA X X X MALDIVES X MALI X 85 MAURITANIA X 75 MOROCCO X NIGER X 2 NIGERIA X X 19 OMAN X X ORIENTAL TIMOR X PAKISTAN X X X PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY X X X PAPUA NEW GUINEA X X PHILIPPINES X X X X QATAR X X RWANDA X X X SAMOA X SAUDI ARABIA X X X SENEGAL X X 28 SIERRA LEONE X X X 90 SOLOMON X X SOMALIA X X X 98 SOUTH AFRICA X SOUTH KOREA X SUDAN X X X 89 SWAZILAND X X SYRIA X X X X TADZHIKISTAN X X X TANZANIA X X 15 TOGO X X 12 TONGA TUNISIA X X TURKEY X X TURKMENISTAN X UNITED ARAB EMIRATES X X X UNITED STATES X X X UZBEKISTAN X X VANUATU WESTERN SAHARA X YEMEN X X 22 81 countries 70 countries 30 countries 52 countries 43 countries (86%) (37%) (64%) (53%) TOTAL POPULATION: 2,027 billions II - Countries where circumcision is rare THE DEATH WARS TORTURE EXCISION PENALTY (): implying (in principle) circumcising countries ARGENTINA X ARMENIA X X ASSAM AUSTRALIA (X) X AUSTRIA BAHAMAS X BELGIUM BELIZE X X BHUTAN BYELORUSSIA X X BOLIVIA X X BOTSWANA X X BRAZIL X X BULGARIA X BURUNDI X (X) X CAMBODIA CANADA CHILE X CHINA X X COLOMBIA X X COSTA RICA CROATIA CUBA X CZECH REPUBLIC DENMARK DOMINICA X EIRE EQUATOR X ESTONIA FINLAND FRANCE (X) GEORGIA X (X) X GERMANY GREECE X GUATEMALA X X GUYANA X X HAITI HONDURAS X HUNGARY ICELAND INDIA X X X ITALIA X JAMAICA X X JAPAN X LAOS X X LATVIA X X LITHUANIA X LUXEMBURG MACEDONIA (X) X MALAWI X X MALTA MAURICE X MEXICO X X X MOLDAVIA X MOZAMBIQUE X X MYANMAR X NAMIBIA X NEDERLAND NEPAL X NEW ZEALAND NICARAGUA NORTH KOREA X NORWAY PANAMA X PARAGUAY X PERU X X X POLAND PORTO RICO PORTUGAL X RUMANIA X RUSSIA X (X) X SALVADOR X X SINGAPORE X X X SLOVAKIA X SLOVENIA SPAIN X SRI LANKA X X X X SURINAM X SWEDEN SWITZERLAND TAIWAN X X THAILAND X X TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO X X UGANDA X X X 5 UKRAINE X UNITED KINGDOM (X) URUGUAY VENEZUELA X VIETNAM X YUGOSLAVIA X (X) ZAMBIA X X ZIMBABWE X X 92 countries 40 countries 10 countries 46 countries 11 (43%) (11%) (50%) (12%) TOTAL POPULATION: 4,116 billions CONCLUSIONS NUMBER THE DEATH WARS TORTURE EXCISION OF COUNTRIES PENALTY (in principle) Circumcising 81 70 30 52 43 countries (2,027 B) (86%) (37%) (64%) (53%) Non circumcising 92 40 10 46 11 countries (4,116 B) (43%) (11%) (50%) (12%) It must not be inferred from these figures that circumcision would concern 1/3rd of the planet. It only strikes 1/5th.''' '''Circumcising countries are less populated (26 millions on average) than countries which leave their children intact (45 millions on average). Of the twelve genocides of modern times: Congo, Hereros, Armenia, Jews, gipsies, Biafra, Bengal, Hutus, Tutsis, Kurds, Bosnia, Darfur, eleven, of which six as actors, implied circumcised on one side or the other, and three on both sides. Except for one civil war (Sri Lanka), all wars, between 1996 and 2002, involved at least one circumcising country and they were more than three times more numerous in circumcising countries. The death penalty is more than twice more common and torture more widespread in them. The feminicide in Eastern Congo is the work of circumcised Hutu looters who destroy after use those who have functioned as a foreskin for them. Excision, practised in a little more than half of circumciser countries, exists with them above all. It is always financed by dads who have themselves been circumcised with the complicity of their own mums. In Norway, 60% of the rapes are committed by 2% of the population who are circumcised. General conclusion Circumcision is a warlike initiation that instils into the individual the creed in a moral and physical superiority, in the aim of making it all the more overbearing, bellicose, sexist and racist as sexually unsatisfied without it ever being able to imagine it without it knowing (it has definitively lost the best of the polyorgasmic enjoyment of the preludes). It generates as blind counter-racism. Excision and circumcision are intimately linked together and it is illusory to attack the first one without attacking the second one. Sources: – Amnesty international. 2002 report. – Amnesty international. “Abolir la peine de mort” 2002; (41). – for excising countries: DHS : http://www.measuredhs.com/ and WHO: http://www.who.int/reproductive-health/publications/fgm/fgm_programmes_review.pdf and UNICEF: http://www.unicef.org/french/pon96/womfgm.htm for Indonesia: http://cirp.org/news/smh01-13-04/ - for the Norwegian statistic: Hofvander I. 9th symposium of NOCIRC in Seattle; 2007